Yeah the hands being so random is in my opinion the game's biggest flaw at the moment. Ideally each player could make their own deck like a traditional card game and so can develop their own strategies, but with custom cards that might get too unbalanced. In the post-jam version I'm planning on adding a menu to see what cards are still in the deck (it won't stop the randomness, but it may let players plan around which cards might show up next turn)
Donian
Creator of
Recent community posts
As can be seen on the jam page description, there's 2 ways it matches the theme "built to scale":
- Firstly, the game itself has been built (designed) to scale (be expanded). The modular system for card effects means more effects could be added, the game itself can be scaled up.
- Secondly, the custom card maker means the player is able to scale the amount of content that is in the game by making more cards.
Thanks for the in-depth feedback! I'll address it parts at a time :D
Firstly the balancing, yeah sadly I didn't have much time to properly balance, I tried to have it be that the 1-cost cards have weaker effects, 2-cost are slightly better and 3-cost are a lot better, but some status effects are inherently better than others just because of their interactions (like how the aggro-stance is probably the best one, the 1 mana difference to normal is actually worth more than the 3 shield points, but also the randomness of the cards means you won't always get a shield card)
Secondly, having different AI use different decks / strategies could be pretty cool, but as each player shares the same deck (to make balancing easier, neither is in a better position card-wise) it might just end up being that it becomes more of a puzzle game, with the player trying to beat the AI at their own strategy. Though in the post-jam update I might add different AI types that are chosen randomly at the start of a match that makes them focus more on specific strategies, as the current AI plays a more general strategy that doesn't let them take full advantage of their cards. As for the AI speed, that's definitely going to be either lowered or given the option to change in the post-jam update.
Lastly, the reason I added all of the "Donian All-Stars" cards and made it a deck without custom cards is to make it so players don't have to create the custom cards if they just want to get into the game. I'm not sure I'll have the time for the post-jam version, but I might add another deck screen that's like "Full Deck", "Aggro-Focus Deck", "Defensive Deck", "Status Deck" or something.
Thanks again for playing, glad you had fun I think!
Sure! Firstly, there isn't really any indication that you're meant to select the items on the right at the start of the level, I didn't realise I had to do that to start with. Secondly, it's not explained that by "activate your new Qubits and tunnel through the walls" it means you need to place the Qubit in the scientist's vision in order to activate it. Also there doesn't seem to be a way to tell where the spotlights will move next, and as they move faster than the player they feel unfair at times.
Thank you for playing, I'm glad you had fun, and thank you for the feedback! I just have a lot of experience making games in PyGame by this point, having used it for the past 2 years.
Technically it was 3 days, as for the first day I made another submission, but also I used that day to plan out this submission. Good planning goes a long way!
I've not done anything specific to make them load faster, it might just be a by-product of my games normally having less detailed art and not a lot of music files. For example Xters ZERO's web zip file is only 5MB, Lylat Escape is 4MB, and Doceana Quest ZERO is 2.5MB. Whereas Lylat, which has quite a few different music files, is 14MB
Hi! I used something called pygbag, it can be installed using pip like any other python library. I don't remember which tutorial I used but there should be a few on youtube for it if you search something like "pygame web pygbag".
There's a pretty big performance hit, for some of my games like Kaya Kaya! it was so bad that for the web version I literally had to double the gamespeed (and set the max framerate to 30 instead of 60) for it to match the windows version. Also some music and sound effects don't play properly on web versions (can be heard in Kana Runes where sometimes the clicking effect doesn't play fully, or in Lylat where the boss theme has a pause at the start)
You can't really do anything about the sound, but if you optimise the game well enough / design the game for it, the fps hit can be solved (e.g. Lylat Escape runs at 60fps despite all the enemies and shots being fired because I lowered the resolution and made sure to not display things unnecessarily).
I'd say it's worth it, a lot more people view and play browser games. Good luck!